Shielding Success Rates Mystery
The highlighted comment was created in this revision.
I started doing some research on my shielding success rates. I started with a small set including Virus, Seraphim, Hydra, Crusader, and Engineer. I did a first test run of 20 seasons. Shielding success occurred on 20/20, 19/20, 20/20, 20/20, and 13/20 seasons respectively. I know why it's not perfect for Engineer, but the other 4 are the mystery. In the RoboRumble, my success rates on the first 4 are currently 5/8, 5/8, 5/8, and 4/7 respectively.
None of the Rumble losses were run by my machine. But all of them were run using client 1.7.3.0. Losses only occurred when run by Voidious and DivineOmega. I'm guessing there is something common about the machines used by you two that is key. Are you both perhaps running under Linux? Also, what version of Java? I need to replicate one of your machines as closely as possible to explore the problem further.
Maybe their clients are skipping turns. Missed scans hurt bullet shielding a lot.
If they want to check that, they sort-of can. It only reports on the last battle that it happened, but if my robot has any skipped turns, it will write a file xander.cat.XanderCat_SkippedTurns.txt file into it's data directory that has the number of skipped turns printed in it. It's not as useful as it could be since it just reports on the last battle that it happened on, but could be worth a check.
Are the tests you run also using 1.7.3.0? (BTW, I'm doing some major bullet-shielding-suffering at the moment...)
